this
remarkable multi-sensory jaunt through each tooth in the author’s
mouth (and culture) is among the most gritty, sophisticated, and wildly
lyrical books you may ever encounter

Richard
Loranger’s Poems for Teeth is an artistic marvel. In addition
to extraordinary poems, the book contains calligraphic representations of
each poem prepared by the author and artist Eric Waldemar and musical scores
and notations for songs within the poems. A diagram that charts the identity
of each tooth appears at the outset, so that the book functions hypertextually
as well. The volume, while lacking a CD-ROM, is nonetheless what poetry should
be: a multimedia tour de force.

After years of dental neglect
and abuse, I really could barely chew, my empty mouth began warping my self-image
to that of an octogenarian (all cheers to them, by the way, but in your
early forties...), and I was looking at thousands of dollars worth of work
if I ever wanted to chew properly again. All this on the budget of an adjunct
in debt. Thus I decided to make a bunch of funny little poems about teeth,
basically to make a quick little chapbook to sell for a $10 donation towards
fixing my teeth. This plan would have worked well, except that once I finally
started writing about teeth, mine or otherwise, the floodgates gaped, and
instead of a month of funny little poems, for over two years out came the
crazy things that you’ll find here, which has become a kind of personal
mythology, or weird post-pagan incantation to keep the rest intact; they’re
odes, a celebration of what teeth are, and have been, and might be, and
a celebration of a few other things I see from dawn to dawn. You will note
that to each of the teeth there is assigned a quality, a riff of sorts off
the wisdom teeth – Tooth of Anger, Tooth of Myth, Teeth of Instinct,
and the like. These assignations are not from some obscure or esoteric source,
nor are they a long-lost trump of metaphysic or divination; I made them
up from what I see every day, and do not intend them to be any more. The
teeth are not a system. They are teeth. These poems are not a system. They
are thank-yous. Thank-yous to my teeth…

Praise for Poems for
Teeth

“Nothing quite prepares
us for Richard Loranger’s Poems for Teeth, a book of poems
unlike any other. Occasioned by a severe jaw infection and the resulting dental
surgeries, these “crazy odes”, “thank-yous to my teeth”,
he calls them, are meant both as acts of remembrance and restitution. Little
lamentations for what is lost, poems of praise for what remains, they sing
through their teeth, as it were, the tender, sad, sorry, outrageous comedy
of our mortality. And each is brought to us in radiant and goofy word-riffs,
arpeggios that ring the rich changes between jeremiad, scat-song, nursery
rhyme, elegy, ode, gospel, gloss, glossolalia…. “The teeth are
32 parts of speech,” Loranger writes. “As long as there are teeth,
there is language.” Between the blind bruxisms of the daily grind and
the brilliant luxuries of the delighted spirit, mind, his words take wing
– “Watch that eye tooth shine!”

-L. S. Asekoff, author of North
Star and Dreams of a Work

When it comes to poetry
– and believe me, it takes a lot to come to poetry! – obsession
knows no bonds, bounds, nor excesses. Case in point: This Loranger….
So now, of course, we have Poems for Teeth, where every one of his
gets its own poem, in one of the most extraordinary and virtuosic poetic feats
since Francis Ponge took on Soap (1942-67). Ponge on poets: "They
know how to hide, to dissimulate their usefulness." Wrong. Richard Loranger,
Poet of Ecstasy in Everyday Drag! Salute You, We Do! And as the extraordinary
poems in this one-of-a-kind venture by a one-of-a-kind poet unwind, the Reader’s
Mind gets a much-needed deep flossing, unhidden and totally useful. Richard
Loranger is another word for Blessing, and this book is another piece of evidence.
I treasure it.

-Bob Holman, author of The
Collect Call of the Wild, co-editor of Poetry Nation and United
States of Poetry, owner of Bowery Poetry Club, NYC

Spurred
by brief conversations that Richard Loranger was having with invisible people
in his shower, Hello Poems (a.k.a. Hello.) document a nine-month
exploration into what it means to say – you guessed it – Hello.
Considered by some to be Loranger’s most political work to date, this
unusual and delightful series of sixty-seven short poems will certainly give
you a new perspective on the nature of the greeting, one that will give you
pause and let you crack a smile in the same breath.